VoIP News - Ribbit : Flash based VoIP
dean - Aug 15, 2007 - 08:39 PM
The Flash/Flex based VoIP systems we've been expecting have begun to arrive.
Stewart at zdnet has uncovered one such effort called Ribbit
There's a lack of documentation at the moment (the product is in BETA) so it's hard to uncover exactly what Ribbit is and does. But it appears at first look to be a proprietory based system, adopting none of the existing standards such as SIP or IAX.
The Ribbit "component" that's available for download and has a fairly feature-rich API including voicemail and contact management), but, critically, it's only the client-side component that is available. Ribbit will run the server.
While I'm a great supporter of innovation in this space (too little of it in my opinion), I'm not a proponent of proprietory protocols. Of course Skype have proved the financial model in proprietory telephony, but that was from having launched back in 2003. It was a totally different world back then.
I also foresee some technical difficulties for Ribbit. Flash 9 does not support UDP, and that means that the audio side of the network is going to be running over TCP/IP, with the Ribbit servers in the middle acting as a proxy. There are issues with that both in terms of latency and in terms of scalability.
Of course to scale in the first place you require mass adoption. That will require that entrepreneurs jump onto the VoIP-enabled webspace and put all of their eggs into the Ribbit basket. Knowing that Adobe hired Henry Seinnrich to help them design and build a SIP stack into Flash 10, to include SIP based VoIP (due for release in December this year) I have to wonder whether a proprietory protocol like Ribbit is actually investable?
Overall, I have to therefore conclude my opinion by saying that I think Ribbit is unlikely to survive in this standards based environment. I think the competition from Adobe is going to be too fierce and coming at them too quickly (this Ribbit release may even prompt Adobe into pushing a release out earlier). I also feel that the time for proprietory systems has gone. Everyone wants to peer with everyone else right now, both in terms of voice and in terms of presence.
The only chance they have of surviving is if they've done something very very clever to circumvent the TCP latency issue, and firewall traversal (both go hand in hand as most firewalls will have TCP ports 25 and 80 open at least). The one way I know of to do this, is to run multiple TCP/IP connections in parallel. This is the way that Skype do it and achieve a very high rate of penetration through firewalls. A caveat though for anyone wanting to do this - I heard on the grapevine a year or two ago that a rather large US company has a patent on such a system. Do your due diligence first.
Dean
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